Well.. openSUSE is actually the successor to what was SuSE Linux Professional, but it's really "different". So you could really say that SuSE Linux Professional "died" and now we have openSUSE.. that's probably more correct. Yes... openSUSE has evolved to become what it is today.

Neither SuSE Prof. nor openSUSE had ANYTHING to do with Red Hat with the exception of the adoption of the "Red Hat" Package Manger. Prior to that, afaik, it used the tar-ball format like Slackware (the earliest roots of SUSE Linux).

SuSE Linux Professional was known for including non-free elements which prevent it's free distribution (unlike Red Hat which was freely and WIDELY distributed under the Red Hat trademark by hundreds if not THOUSANDS of would be money makers in a plethora of commercially available formats, stores, etc.). Some of the non-free elements included things like commercial trial prodcut ware and originally, YaST. YaST was eventually made totally free (Novell actually helped support many freedom moves after the acquisition). The 3rd party add-ons (anything with a non-OSS approved license) were moved to a separate repository so that it was possible to download a totally OSS version of openSUSE and distribute freely (as long as OSS license terms were met). Thus, like Fedora (for example), there could be a distributable distro protected by trademark (something that I think you argue that Red Hat lost back in the 90's by NOT preventing the plethora of resellers using their name).